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Beyond
Contacts 3.00 by Dataviz
Introduction: Dataviz has a long standing reputation for producing
excellent PDA software (Documents-to-Go possibly being the best known) and
so, when they introduced Beyond Contacts and billed it as the
“closest thing to outlook for your PDA,” I just had to try it.
The software
lived up to its billing. I had been looking for a piece of software that
would provide an all-in-one solution for all my internal database programs
(Address Book, Date Book, To Do List, and Memo Pad) and this seemed to fit
the bill – especially since I was already syncing my PDA with
Outlook.
The Good: Putting aside the
program interface for a moment, one of the most important features of
Beside Contacts is the ability for it to import and export every single
field from Outlook into your PDA. You remember all those customizable
fields in Outlook, don’t you? You know: the things like the
contact’s spouse’s mother’s maiden name? (Just kidding
with that one…) Well, you can import every one of them into Beyond
Contacts.
The most
important thing that this program offers to me, however, is the ability to
access my addresses, notes, schedule, tasks, and my email from within one
program. On top of that, the interface, as seen in the screen shot below,
is virtually the same as the Outlook Today view.
Today View: The Today View
within Beyond Contacts displays a column of icons along the left side very
similar to the Shortcut Bar in Outlook. As a matter of fact, the icons work
in the same way in that they open the corresponding program. This allows
you to access all these programs without having to exit out of one to go
into another. The bulk of the screen is filled with a list of the
appointments, tasks, and a summery of your emails just like it is in Outlook.
You can
easily jump from one portion of the program into another after opening one
of them as well. Once you are in inside the portion of your program of
choice, you can access a folder list, like that seen above, by tapping on
the program’s title window. This is also reminiscent of
Outlook’s folder list and works much in the same way.
The Calendar
portion of the program displays the calendar in a daily, a 5-day grid view,
a 7-day summary, and monthly views.
The Contacts
screen is actually one of my favorites. Unlike
Outlook, the contacts view in Beyond Contacts offers you one very important
option – the ability to sort and display the contacts by category.
Contacts can be looked up by searching for them or by tapping on the
alphabet bar on the right.
The Task
List, in my opinion, is another improvement over the Palm To Do List in
that, among other things, it will allow you to edit an entire page worth of
details for each task including hours spent on the task, mileage, billing
info, etc. Another option lets you choose more than one category for each
task or to have the task reoccurring.
The Notes
screen is also an improvement. You are not only given the standard method
of categorizing notes, but you are also allowed to assign one of 5
different colors to each note – thus adding
another way identify a group of notes.
Finally, we
come to the Inbox. When you install Beyond Contacts you are given
the option of also installing Dataviz Mail which
will allow you to sync your PDA with Microsoft Outlook’s email
client. Unfortunately my office uses a different email setup so I have been
unable to check out this feature.
The Bad: Several years ago
my wife and I went to visit my parents and, while there, she and my Mom
walked next door to a house that was having a yard sale. (Not knowing how
widespread the practice is, I’ll define it for you. A yard sale is
where you clean out your house of any unwanted items that are just too good
to throw away. You put prices on them and people with little better to do
will drive up and purchase them from you…) She returned to where I
was and announced that she had found a piece of furniture that she wanted
to put in our living room – something called a shrunk.
Not being
familiar with the term, I thought to myself, “Shrunk – it
sounds like “shrink” and rhymes with “trunk” so it
must be a small trunk…” Was I ever wrong! This piece of
furniture was 7 foot tall, 12 foot wide, and about
2.5 foot deep! It took up and entire wall!
Don’t
get me wrong. It’s a beautiful piece of furniture, serves many
purposes, and I enjoy using it. I just can’t help but notice,
however, how much room it takes in my living room.
That’s
the way Beyond Contacts is. It’s a wonderful piece of software,
provides many functions, I don’t know if I want to do without it, but
it is a massive memory hog and uses what, in my opinion, is an extreme
amount of RAM.
What takes so
much memory? Well, the way the program works is you have one program for
each of the separate sub-programs that it replaces – one for
contacts, one for tasks, etc. (Actually the word “replaces” is
probably wrong because the originals aren’t replaced, just not
used…) Each of these “sub-programs” also has it’s
own database that is entirely different from the default one used by your
internal programs such as DateBook. Finally, you
have one program to control them all (kinda like
The Lord of the Rings – “one ring to rule them
all…” ;) ) All in all you have close
to 20 additional files taking up, in my case, almost 2 Mb of RAM.
Unfortunately, at this time, Dataviz does not
support Beyond Contacts to run from ROM or from the memory Stick.
I there a
silver lining to this cloud? I think so. Some users may have the need to
sync their PDA into completely different databases. In that case, they can
sync Beyond Contacts with Microsoft Outlook and sync the internal apps with
the Palm Desktop.
Wish List: If I could make
just a few changes to Beyond Contacts it would be to change 2 things:
1) This program, is pretty as it is, does not take advantage of
Hi-Res+ screens so therefore there is a lot of
wasted screen “real estate” that is not taken advantage of.
2) The main
drawback for most people being able to use this product in the requirement
to have at least 1.6 Mb free RAM. Hopefully future
releases will allow you to store the bulk of this on external memory.
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